Late Night: The Last Waltz

Another Thanksgiving holiday tradition is The Last Waltz. I was living in the Bay Area at the time and fantasized about winning tickets to the concert.

In his autobiography, concert promoter Bill Graham says that when the Band’s singer-guitarist Robbie Robertson told him that he wanted to do one final concert on Thanksgiving, he was the one who came up with the idea of serving dinner. Graham then goes on to list the evening’s menu: “Two hundred and twenty turkeys…five hundred extra turkey legs that weighed six hundred pounds. Stuffing…sautéed in one hundred pounds of butter…ninety gallons of sauce made from drippings. Forty crates of lettuce for the salad. Eighteen cases of cranberries. Two thousand pounds of peeled yams. Four hundred pounds of pumpkin pie. Rock and roll’s last supper.” Martin Scorsese’s documentary about this momentous occasion doesn’t dwell on the fact that Graham and Co. prepared a “buffet for fifty-four hundred people,” but you can sense that something special, both grand and intimate, is taking place. It’s the ultimate portrait of a band, a showman and a community giving thanks for what they had. You should play this movie loud, with family and friends present, and on a full stomach.

So without further ado, here are a few videos from that momentous evening, November 25, 1976.